Depression-era agriculture and the magic of high fructose corn syrup

In this final section of the book, the Joads briefly find themselves in a comfortable situation in a government-sponsored camp, only to be moved along once more after an incident leads Tom to commit murder again. The heavy-handed lesson that follows about human kindness and the importance of giving aid to all that need it and Biblical allusions and so on ties a peculiar bow, but a bow nonetheless, on Steinbeck’s epic. The Joads may be fucked, but humanity will go on. It usually does. A section that strongly stood out to me was Chapter 25, one of the interlude chapters, wherein Steinbeck describes the destruction of food surpluses and arable land left unfarmed in accordance with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, an important piece of New Deal legislation enacted in 1933, found unconstitutional in 1936, and then reworked and replaced by something only slightly different in 1938. Because of this act, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence that keeping the agricultural industry stable would help the rest of the country, an incredible amount of land was not put to use. Food was left to waste, for farmers could make more money from the government than they could from the consumer who needed it. In the world of the book, Steinbeck imagines the frustration that these practices caused to be the precursor to a significant upheaval; this chapter even includes the titular line, “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” I don’t get the sense that a revolution was in order, as so much of the American population was still rather comfortable, but rather some sort of organized action that could turn heads and make people see that fellow citizens were starving, jobless and homeless, that they already had nothing and the government was preventing the food from even being taken from their mouths. Unfortunately, this is a situation that we are still dealing with, although obviously it’s not as dire (yet). Farmers today are still paid not to farm, or to save up their crops in order to keep prices high. This is becoming more and more unreasonable as unemployment and poverty rise once again. Corn is one crop that is heavily subsidized while still being overutilized, a fact first brought to my attention by Michael Pollan in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It is used in feed for animals that do not regularly consume corn, in sodas and fruit drinks as the artificial sweetener high fructose corn syrup, in many processed foods like chicken nuggets and twinkies, and in ethanol fuel. Yet with that much corn being used for so many different purposes, corn farmers are still paid to keep a huge amount of their crop out of the hands of the public. Of course corn is not the only culprit here, but it is one of the most extreme examples. While some full-scale revolt may be a bit overkill right now, I think if economic conditions were to worsen to a Depression-era level, many would begin to take a more serious look at the way the government deals with the agricultural industry.

On a sillier note, here are a few ads released by the Corn Refiners Association about a year ago that claim that high fructose corn syrup isn't so bad, after all!